eJoint anxiety is not an official medical diagnosis, but everyone knows what it means. The American Psychological Association defines it as “the chronic fear of environmental cataclysms that arise from observing the seemingly irreparable effects of climate change and concerns related to one's future and the concerns of the next generation.” It is filled with fear of the future, pain in the past, and insanity in the present.
MAH is a professor of urban and environmental studies at the University of Glasgow and an activist with a passionate interest in pollution, ecological collapse and climate justice. Her previous book, Petrochemical Planets and Unlimited Plastics, catalogued the devastating impact of the petrochemical industry on the natural and human world. In the red pocket, trauma is personal.
For some, ecological anxiety is paralyzed. For others, it's a spur of action. They don't often respond by leaving to clear their ancestors' tombs. In the case of MAH, the proposal, proposed when her father heard about plans to visit her ancestor village in southern China, takes on the urgency of quest. In Chinese folk tradition, ancestors, ignored by descendants, become creatures with “hungry ghosts,” “bloated stomachs, disturbed hair, and long, thin necks that suffer from insatiable needs.”
The red pocket is divided into three parts. First record is MAH's trip to China. Along with her cousin Amanda and her local guide, Lily, Mar cannot find her great grandmother's grave. Her tea gift in a British phone box can is received casually as “not as good as Chinese tea.” What the village elders in particular, especially the idyllic uncle Maher, actually wants is for her to build a house in the village. Or at least hand out cash envelopes – “Red Pocket” in the book title.
Mah returns from the trip with more questions than answers and suffers from physical symptoms of escalating ecological disease: shortness of breath, insomnia, crying. In the second section of the book, we see a ghostly hopeless woman facing the magnitude of the problem. In 2021, she is part of the COP26 Climate Conference delegation. “I don't know what I found,” she writes. Meanwhile, her mother calls from Canada: “This is the end time,” she says. After a summer of drought and wildfires, British Columbia landslides destroy thousands of homes.
To deal with the panic attack, Mah tries treatment, but gives after a few weeks. “My 'intrusive' thoughts about the climate crisis were not distorted. They were real,” she writes. “My hackle has risen again. It's a tuning fork of what's underneath.”
This makes the red pocket sound like nothing more than a series of despair. However, in part 3, MAH offers a way to get out of intergenerational trauma, the possibility of “live with ghosts.” “There are bridges between divided worlds, where all spirits can rest without sorrow.
Robin Wall Kimmerer's The Service Berry (2024) can be viewed as a book by Mah's sisters. For both women, ways to get out of ecological and social disruptions require different mindsets. We live in the debt we owe to the social, spiritual, and natural world that nurtures gratitude and joy and supports us.
“The hungry ghost was still clung to me… but I knew I had to do,” writes Ma. “Searching for offerings. There is no fruit or fragrance, no rituals set. It should not only be unique to me, but it must be a community and face outwardly beyond myself.”
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Given the subtitles, it is not a revelation that the offering she refers to is the book itself. The Red Pocket doesn't offer all the catch solutions, but instead raises questions about how we should live in times of trouble. What do you do to your offspring: a hungry ghost or a cooperative ancestor? That choice is with agents and wishes.
